Kinston Department of Public Safety is taking the Upper Deck and Topps approach in a method to interact with the community with a trading card initiative.

The cards contain information of the officers — including email addresses, hobbies and philosophies — and Commander Cary Barnes said officers have started passing them out in the community.

“The whole concept is better interaction with the citizens, and it allows them to get in contact with a certain officer if they have an issue,” Barnes said. “We want communication to be personal over just business.”

KDPS director Bill Johnson said he had read about the program working in other cities across the nation, and decided to bring the initiative to Kinston after receiving positive feedback from his department.

“The goal of the program is to do everything in our power to better our relationship with the community,” Johnson said. “We gave each officer a choice to put as much or little on the card as possible. We didn’t have them give out personal information for officer safety reasons, but some of the cards have their names, rank on the force, hobbies, favorite sports teams and philosophies.

“The officers can go into the community and pass out material everyone can relate to. Hopefully, the citizens will share those and see us from a human perspective, instead of just a badge and uniform in the community.”

The only bad news is that you can’t go to your local convenience store or card shop to purchase a pack of the cards. Johnson said the only way to acquire a card is through conversation with an officer.

“The reason we set it up that way is because people may come to the office and say ‘I want to get one for my daughter or son,’ ” Johnson said. “The only way to make sure the program is doing what it’s supposed to do is having that one-on-one contact between an officer and citizen. Any citizen can get one, but there has to be social contact.”

Officer Clinton Glover said the cards should make it easier for the community to speak to officers who have helped them with issues in the past.

“A lot of times when an officer makes interaction with a citizen they want to get back in contact with them, but they can’t remember the officer’s name and we didn’t have (business) cards,” Glover said. “We would either give them the non-emergency number and most don’t want to call because they want the specific officer.

“With these cards, we give them our email address and a way to familiarize the officers to the citizens.”

Junious Smith III can be reached at 252-559-1077 and Junious.Smith@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JuniousSmithIII.